MONTREAL — Last month, Jean Charest painted a rosy picture of Quebec’s climate change efforts during his time as premier, but a new government report suggests the province is only a fraction of the way toward its goals, despite a $1.5-billion plan.

In 2006, Quebec had projected it would cut 14.5 megatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions by the end of 2012, but in fact cut less than two megatonnes by March 2012, according to a progress report published with little fanfare last month on the Environment Department’s website.

That’s only 13 per cent of the goal Quebec set for itself back in June 2006, when Charest unveiled the province’s 2006-2012 climate change action plan.

To reach the target, Quebec said it would set up programs to improve energy efficiency, invest in public transit, require landfill sites to capture methane from decomposing organic material, have speed-limiting devices installed on trucks set to 105 kilometres per hour and help municipalities evaluate their greenhouse-gas emissions.

For some parts of the plan — related to transportation of merchandise — only eight per cent of what had been projected was actually cut, said Patrick Bonin, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner.

Other sectors were even worse. A plan to set up a program to help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture, food production, forestry and municipalities resulted in reductions of less than one per cent of the projected cut.

“Obviously, the Liberal government was lax and didn’t have a serious approach to the fight against climate change,” Bonin said. “They said the right things and claimed to be leaders on climate change, but that wasn’t backed up by the kinds of actions that were needed to deal with the challenge.”

Click to see how Quebec fared on its greenhouse gas-reduction plans.

The plan had two aims: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and adapting to climate change. Back in 2006, then-environment minister Claude Béchard said the plan, with its “realistic and responsible goals,” would make Quebec the climate change leader in Canada.

It was to help Quebec meet its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. In 2010, Quebec’s greenhouse-gas emissions were just 1.6 per cent below 1990 levels, making it difficult to reach the 2012 target, Bonin said.

Many of the actions laid out in the plan only began to come into effect in 2009, so their results will only be known later, the report said.

Only actions whose greenhouse-gas emissions were measurable by March 31, 2012, were included in the report. That meant greenhouse-gas reductions for several promises — such as a plan to require car manufacturers to meet stricter pollution targets that was expected to cut 1.7 megatonnes of emissions — had not been calculated yet.

More than 60 per cent of the budget for the 2006-2012 action plan targeted the transportation sector, which accounts for 42 per cent of Quebec’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

The results of the climate change action plan did not come as a surprise to Quebec environmental groups, which pointed out the provincial sustainable-development commissioner had already found last year that Quebec was far from meeting its environmental goals. Jean Cinq-Mars said that although Quebec’s goals were commendable, the government wasn’t following through with action to achieve them.

Bonin said he hadn’t expected the government to meet the 2012 targets, but his group was surprised to see how poorly Quebec did.

“We weren’t expecting so few results and such a delay in putting the measures in place,” Bonin said. “That was an unpleasant surprise.”

The Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique went even further. It called the Charest government’s climate change actions a “fiasco” and criticized other environmental groups for not holding the government to account on its promises.

The results will make it even harder for Quebec to reach its 2020 emission targets, the AQLPA said. The Parti Québécois government has promised to increase the reduction target to 25 per cent by 2020.

“The government will have to work twice as hard to achieve the goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 under the 1990 level,” said AQLPA president André Bélisle.

In an article written with former California Gov. Gray Davis, Charest last month called Quebec a climate change leader, adopting ambitious environmental goals, even if they were at odds with the political winds in the rest of the country.

“Efforts made in recent years have enabled Quebec to become a true leader in the fight against climate change,” the article said, mentioning the climate change plan and the fact that it had funded more than 2,000 projects.

Charest could not be reached for comment.

While Quebec is still among the top Canadian provinces acting on climate change, the results of the 2006-2012 plan show there is still a lot of work to be done, said Ian Bruce, science and policy manager for the David Suzuki Foundation. Quebec needs to ensure the Transportation and Natural Resources departments work with the Environment Department on climate change, he said, suggesting Quebec appoint a senior official in the premier’s officer to take charge of climate change actions.

“Those ministries all have to be going in the same direction,” said Bruce, one of the authors of a report that last year compared provincial climate change action.

The majority of the funding for Quebec’s 2006-2012 climate change action plan — $1.2 billion — came from a 2007 carbon tax imposed on some fossil fuels, including petroleum and natural gas. Money collected was put into a provincial green fund. Added to that was $350 million in federal funding, and another $30 million in interest on money in the green fund.

Not all the money was spent by March 2012, the report says. While nearly all the money had been promised to different projects by July 2012, only about half had actually been spent by March 2012.

Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions requires action from all sectors of society, and expanding the carbon tax to cover more emissions would create a financial incentive for people and businesses to act, Bruce said.

The progress report says the plan brought other benefits besides reducing emissions. In the transportation sector, for example, investments made under the plan reduced fossil fuel use and contributed to local economies, the report says.

Last June, the previous Liberal government unveiled the 2013-2020 climate change action plan. It budgeted an additional $2.7 billion to cut emissions by 11.7 megatonnes by 2020. Again, the majority of the money is to be spent on transportation measures such as public transit.

But environmental groups say that plan won’t do enough to cut emissions, and it lacked coherence. At the time, they complained that on the one hand, the Environment Department was working to cut emissions, while on the other the Natural Resources Department was promoting oil and gas development.

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